Yahoo! Launching Digital Magazines, Starting With Food (Adweek)
Yahoo! is getting into the magazine business. During a keynote presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), CEO Marissa Mayer announced several new products, including a planned line of digital magazines, starting with Yahoo! Food. A similar product is in the work for Yahoo! Tech, which is being helmed by former New York Times columnist David Pogue. Mayer also used her CES keynote to unveil Yahoo! News Digest, a twice daily mobile news product that aggregates and synthesizes news from across the Web. USA Today The ventures represent the latest manifestation of Mayer’s emphasis on creating original material as a key part of her effort to turn around the fortunes of the tech company. The Verge When the news-summarizing startup Summly shut down last March, it was easy to imagine the company had simply been swallowed by the Yahoo! machine. Like so many founders before him, Nick D’Aloisio had sold his company to Yahoo! only to see it shuttered soon after. Its core technology was absorbed into Yahoo!’s news app less than a month later, used to summarize the day’s events. That was the last we heard from D’Aloisio, who sold Summly to Yahoo! for a reported $30 million at the age of 17 — until Tuesday. NY Observer / BetaBeat A buzz balloon about Yahoo!’s CES appearance and new product unveiling has been building and building, and now it’s popped, raining tiny chunks of news stories (“atoms”) on the heads of tech journalists everywhere. It’s not a disappointment, provided you were searching for yet another way to consume news in 2014. Ad Age / Digital Over the past year, Yahoo! has re-launched email, the homepage and Flickr. Now it’s time for a new look for its old ad business. Yahoo! is doing away with two of its highest profile ad-tech products — Right Media and Genome — and unveiling a new one, Yahoo! Advertising.

NBC, Prepared for The Worst at Sochi (Capital New York)
The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, will be one of the biggest news stories of the coming months. There will of course be the games themselves, but in the minds of many of those attending and covering it at NBC, the uncertain security situation in the region holds a prominent spot. “I think we all know as we head to Sochi that we are in for an interesting ride,” said NBC Today co-anchor Matt Lauer, speaking to press inside Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza Tuesday afternoon. HuffPost / The Backstory Bob Costas, the face of NBC’s primetime Sochi Olympics coverage, recently made headlines by telling the Associated Press that he was more interested in interviewing President Vladimir Putin about Russia’s controversial anti-gay laws than in offering his own commentary. That comment, Costas said Tuesday, was misinterpreted by some to suggest that he would avoid discussion of the widely condemned law banning gay “propaganda.” “If Putin doesn’t drag his butt into the studio, then we’ll talk about it without him,” Costas said during an Olympics press preview. Variety NBCUniversal has raised eyebrows with its decision to transmit every competition in the next month’s Winter Olympics from Sochi live via digital means. But at least one part of the grand athletic cavalcade is being reserved for TV alone. The opening ceremonies will be broadcast on NBC on Friday, Feb. 7, and will not be live-streamed, NBCU executives said Tuesday at a press event. “We want to put context to it, with the full pageantry it deserves,” said Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC Sports Group.